Sara Abbasian | "Weapons and Medals": Dastan's Basement

Dastan’s Basement is pleased to announce the opening of Sara Abbasian’s solo exhibition, Weapons and Medals. The exhibition will be on view from January 8 to January 30, 2026.

The exhibition brings together two interconnected bodies of work which, in continuity with the artist’s longstanding concerns, articulate a tense and multilayered world. The first series consists of drawings on paper produced over twelve consecutive days and nights in Tehran. During this period, the sounds of explosions and the silences that followed shaped the rhythm of the works’ production. The result is a body of drawings rendered with obsessive detail, depicting flowers, infants, weapons, medals, and military uniforms; elements that have become familiar and recurrent within Abbasian’s visual language.

Within this series is a subsection titled Snipers, in which rabbits replace the animals previously present in the artist’s work, such as dogs and bats. Here, the symbolic significance of animals in Abbasian’s practice comes to the fore. She regards animals as part of our collective unconscious, believing that humans respond to them instinctively with emotional and often contradictory reactions, ranging from affection to fear. Abbasian employs these instinctive responses as a means of activating layers of meaning and emotion without relying on linear narration. The designation of rabbits—fragile, cautious, and vulnerable creatures—as “snipers” introduces an inversion of meaning that prompts the viewer to reconsider concepts such as violence and victimhood.

The second series, titled Green Rifles, consists of acrylic paintings on canvas dominated by shades of green. In these works, weapons occupy an ambivalent position: they are simultaneously present and absent—concealed beneath layers of paint and covered with patterns reminiscent of military camouflage. Abbasian approaches the act of covering forms with calculated precision, even recording the number of brushstrokes in each painting as a visual code inscribed onto the canvas. In this series, concealment itself becomes both a painterly and conceptual act—one that not only shapes the aesthetic of the work but also functions as a mode of engagement with the very notion of war: a presentation of what must be seen and, at the same time, hidden. Taken as a whole, this exhibition—like the rest of Sara Abbasian’s practice—constitutes an attempt to articulate a multilayered experience of war; one that unfolds not through linear storytelling, but through image, symbol, and painterly sensitivity.

Sara Abbasian (b. 1982, Tehran, Iran) holds a degree in painting from Payam Noor University in Tehran. Her work has consistently focused on the visual representation of war and its fundamental contradictions—between life and death, hope and despair, heroism and catastrophe. She began her professional practice in the mid-2000s, holding her first solo exhibition in 2006 at Niavaran Café Gallery. Her most recent solo exhibition, Straw Dogs (2023), was presented at O Gallery. Abbasian has previously held several solo exhibitions at Mohsen Gallery, including Cluster 5 (2021), White Rose (2018), Epidemic (2017), Indestructible Gravity (2016), The Night-Blind Do Not Spare Each Other (2015), Untitled (2015), Defenseless (2014), and Talkhzad (2014). Other solo exhibitions include Untitled (2010) in Zurich and War (2007), staged in an abandoned building on Dibaji Street in Tehran. Her work has also been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including Asia Now (Paris, 2021), Art Dubai (Dubai, 2018), Scope Basel (Lucerne, 2015), Contemporary Istanbul (Istanbul, 2012), and the Athens Video Art Festival at the Technopolis Museum (Athens, 2008). Her works have additionally been included in the Luciano Benetton Collection and published in Imago Mundi (2013).